Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age: Reflections on Language, Argument, and the Telling of Stories

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Patricia Lewis Poteat

As a novelist and essayist, Walker Percy has established himself as one of America's most distinguished and provocative men of letters. His novels are widely read and critically acclaimed, and his essays reflect a serious and sustained effort to answer many of the crucial questions of our time. In Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age, Patricia Lewis Poteat draws a fine comparison between Percy's novels and essays. She finds not only that the fiction is sounder philosophically than the essays, but that Percy "solves" philosophical problems in his novels that he tackles in vain in the essay form.

Poteat begins with the premise that the superordination of the language of mathematics and the physical sciences has made it impossible for us to speak of ourselves as human beings in modern Western culture. She sees this way of "old modernist" thinking — expressed paradigmatically by Rene Descartes — as a trap that has claimed Percy, particularly in the essays in which he employs language fashioned upon an austere mathematical model of the self to develop a theory of man. Poteat argues that the real questions that concern Percy — What is it to be a man and to live and die? Why is man so sad in the twentieth century? — cannot be answered in this language because they cannot even be asked in it. In his novels, however, Percy is not constrained by Caresian rationalism. Instead, presenting us with persons in predicaments and employing the modes of argument available only to the storyteller, Percy finds solutions to the questions he raises but fails to resolve in his more "rigorous" essays.

Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age is both an essay in contemporary cultural criticism and a careful evaluation of the narrative form and the philosophical essay as instruments in the search for and articulation of a theory of man. Seeing Percy to be animated by a polemical intent toward the "old modern age" in both literary forms, Poteat's question becomes: "What is there about the medium of the story that makes his marksmanship so sure? In contrast, why does the philosophic medium produce a parallax which obscures the target and becomes a danger to the user?" She concludes that the brilliant success of the novelist together with the systematic and therefore philosophically illuminating confusion of the essayist disclose profound differences in the novel and the philosophical essay as instruments for reflection. Poteat's argument is highly original and will speak to those readers of Percy who resonate to his existential puzzlements, not always knowing quite sure why, as well as to those who are now contributing to the growing body of Percy scholarship.

Table of Contents

1. Prologue
2. "The Delta Factor" or, on the joys and sorrows of being without a theory of man
3. Percy as storyteller or, how to avoid getting zapped by the ravening particles
4. Percy as philosophical essayist or, why novelists, Helen Keller, and three-year-olds succeed where linguistic philosophers fail
5. "The Message in the Bottle" or, what it means to be a castaway and wait for news from across the seas
6. The joys and sorrows of symbol-mongering or, why it is better to stay in Covington, Louisiana, and write stories than venture to M.I.T. and be captured by a language acquisition device
7. Epilogue
8. Index

Patricia Lewis Poteat is Humanities Scholar in Residence in the Office of the Governor of North Carolina and serves on the staff of the North Carolina Board of Science and Technology.

Publication Date: January 1, 1985

Pages: 117